The short answer is yes. If you consider iceboats and landsailers, these craft regularly exceed the speed of the wind because they sail on a medium (ice and land) that has less friction than water. However, there are many waterborne craft that can exceed the speed of the wind as well. These are mostly planing monohulls, lightweight multihulls, and foil-borne sailboats. When a boat moves through the water, the forward movement of the boat combined with the wind creates a phenomenon we call apparentwind that's the wind that the sails feeland this is a slightly stronger wind. For example, the wind you feel when you stick your hand out of a car window is a combination of the car's speed and the existing wind. As a boat begins to build speed, this apparent wind builds too, allowing the boat to sail slightly faster. So you can see that it's possible for a boat to sail faster than the existing wind. Usually the three kinds of boats I mentioned above are those whose performance regularly exceeds the speed of the wind, but conventional monohulls can do this too under the right circumstances. For a more in-depth treatment on this topic, you might want to pick up a copy of Frank Bethwaite's High Performance Sailing

By choosing to post the reply above you agree to the rules you agreed to when joining Sailnet.
Click Here to view those rules.

Register Now

In order to be able to post messages on the SailNet Community forums, you must first register. Please enter your desired user name, your email address and other required details in the form below.Please note: After entering 3 characters a list of Usernames already in use will appear and the list will disappear once a valid Username is entered.

User Name:

Password

Please enter a password for your user account. Note that passwords are case-sensitive.

Password:

Confirm Password:

Email Address

Please enter a valid email address for yourself.

Email Address:

Log-in

User Name

Remember Me?

Password

Human Verification

In order to verify that you are a human and not a spam bot, please enter the answer into the following box below based on the instructions contained in the graphic.